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mossoi

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Everything posted by mossoi

  1. That assumes a known amount of files though, the filename needs to be built based on the occurence of the loop. I don't know any C but in PHP it would be something like this: // Reset count $i = 1; while (criteria for while loop) { // Assign value to $filename $filename = "C:\[directoryName]\" . $i . "\.txt"; [do something with the file name] // Increment the count $i++; }
  2. Sayo, I'm not attempting to argue which OS is best, only the percentage of users on each one. You've changed the title of this thread away from its original meaning which has undermined several of the arguments it contains.
  3. Of course they have a choice. Take the OS off. More than likely the type of person who's going to be concerned about the OS they are running is going to buy components to build a proper PC rather than a bog standard store bought one. The people who buy off the shelf PC's are generally happy with Windows, if they weren't then Windows wouldn't come pre-installed. Why is it always the assumption that Windows has spread purely because of the marketing efforts of MS. If people wanted PC's without an OS then that's what would be for sale. It's like all products, stores stock what people buy.
  4. I agree with Callipygous here. The point I'm making has nothing to do with which OS is better than the other. I'm merely pointing out that the USAGE figure of 90% Windows is well to be expected. I also don't see why usage time and capacity has anything to do with this. We are talking about the number of computers running an OS not how much computing is done by each OS. It's not 9 admins per *nix box it's 9 boxes per admin - ie: you need 3 times the number of admins than with Windows servers to meet the same performance targets. I'm citing corporate networks here because the number of PC's they use far outweighs other types of organisations that may have a need for Linux. Which company would introduce Linux as it's standard desktop with the knowledge that 99% of the staff would need to be trained just to write a letter and manage their data? Don't forget most people don't use computers for technical reasons. A room full of journalists isn't interested about the latest capabilities of their PC, they just want to write articles as they always have done. That figure of 3000 does take into account communicating with other networks. Gateways account for a small percentage of the total server needs.
  5. You're basing that on opinion though. The costing models for running large networks haven't been chucked together. They are based around the customers needs and delivery of a service within certain parameters based on years of data. I'm not sure you can beg to differ with industry standards. The security patches to Windows aren't as constant as you think, more often than not it's just a case of changing firewall settings which is done centrally. Desktop patches are rolled out to all workstations automatically. 900 employees, hardly a large network. In almost all cases moving users to Linux from Windows will cost magnitudes more in retraining and lost time than any money saved. I'm not trying to say that either OS is better, just that Windows is by far the most common OS. That's a pretty weak argument and again is nothing more than opinion.
  6. The 90% figure is probably not too far off. I admin a big network - we have 40,000+ Windows workstations and something like 3,000 servers. Even if all the servers were running *nix (which they aren't) it's still less than 10%. I think there's a lack of understanding in this thread of the real world use of computers, especially in corporate environments. The technical performance of computers and servers often doesn't factor very highly in the running costs associated with them. An example: The industry guideline for the number of servers that each network admin can look after and still meet the business targets (uptime, configuration etc.) is 9 for *nix and 30 for Windows. You would need more than thrice the number of admins to run a *nix network than for Windows. These are the figures businesses look at when choosing technology. regardless of whether *nix is better than Windows the cost of Windows is considerably less and so it is the preferred solution in many cases. As for the cost of licensing Windows, this becomes negligible in the grand scheme of things. I don't know the price of an OEM license (50 - 60 quid maybe, within that region anyway). If a company was to switch its workstations over to *nix the cost of retraining all its staff would far, far outweigh the savings in licenses. While *nix may be running the major backbones like it always has its foothold in workstations and computers people actually use directly is very, very low and there's a whole load more workstations than servers out there. Sayo: Do you have access to the stats for this site? It would be interesting to know the ratio of Windows to *nix hits this site gets. There's no point asking because inveriably people aren't going to be honest - bear in mind also that the nature of this site means that it's going to have a higher percentage of Linux users than most other sites.
  7. Don't forget most of the computer users don't give a damn about how the PC works, they just want it to help them produce whatever they are doing. They already know Windows, it meets their needs, so why would they switch? Anyway, back to swap files - IMO it will reduce the performance. Why not give it a go and post the results here?
  8. We're trying to decide if it's more blue or more spherical. We've tried to define how blue it is and how spherical it is but what about considering what more means? Could "being more" be measured by the number of different external criteria that cause the property to be evident. So a ball in a dark room but in your hands is more spherical, whereas a ball in a lit room but not touchable could be more blue. If we look at it from this angle then the ball is more spherical - it's easier to disguise it's blueness than its sphericity ergo its spends more time being observably spherical than observably blue. Also... Is it more plastic than it is blue or spherical?
  9. It doesn't have to be the full colour spectrum all the time - water with a coloured light on it will reflect that colour. This is true of many substances. If the ball were subjected to very bright red light would we not see red light reflected back?
  10. While it MIGHT be true to say that all substances have colour (hydrogen gas?) could you not also say that all substances have all colours? At some point water is going to reflect/refract every colour in the spectrum. It may be reflecting yellow at one point but that doesn't mean the water is yellow. Plastic objects are a good example of this - the reflective nature of most plastics means that pretty much any colour can be seen reflected from a plastic ball in the right conditions and that's without changing any of the balls properties, just its environment.
  11. In this case CVS refers to a CVS repository rather than a comma separated values file.
  12. XHTML uses the same extensions as HTML (asp, php, htm, html, etc.). It's a good idea to declare the doctype for each page though (you've gotta do it if you want it to validate properly). This is what I use on my site which is XHTML Strict: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
  13. It certainly is but that's what came with the harware. Heh, I didn't count the one in the PSU.
  14. XHTML is less forgiving than HTML. There's not a huge amount of difference between the two when you actually use them to build a page but some things that you can use in HTML aren't allowed in XHTML. It's best use XHTML and validate your source code. That way you can be sure that you've written it in such a way that it can be considered as well formed. Have a look at this: http://webdesign.about.com/cs/xhtmlxml/a/aa013100a.htm
  15. It's the case - there's 2 fans at the front drawing air in, 2 exhausts at the back and 1 exhaust at the top. A quick count reveals 7 fans in total - more than I thought. As you say, it depends on the case.
  16. This isn't an UNKNOWN dll it's screamingly obvious that it's spyware - HELPER101.dll says it all really!!!! Do a google search for "helper101.dll" and read any of the first 50 results. You can't just answer every problem with the possibilty that it's file corruption, a virus or incompatibility, it's useless in diagnosing a problem and is the same as saying "it's broken" - you'd be suprised at how infrequently that's actually the case. If you want to become knowledgeable about computers you need to look into the root cause of these problems not just put it down to unknown failures. "My PC is acting strange, I must have a virus" is the cry of the inexperienced end user. It's pretty easy to discern whether a problem is due to a virus and usually it's not.
  17. That's why I qualified my statement to exclude different loads. Just out of interest I took the side panels off my case and my CPU temperature jumped up by 4C.
  18. If you're looking to use one of them to build a web site I would start with XHTML Transitional and then investigate XML.
  19. A PC will reach a point at which it's temperature stabalises and reaches a maximum value (excepting different loads on the components) within a couple of minutes of being turned on - if there was an overheating problem you'd barely get into the OS after boot-up. If it's cool enough after 4 minutes it'll be cool enough after 4 weeks, 4 months or 4 years. I have forgotten on several occasions to replace the heatsink on various CPU's, it's pretty obvious in a few seconds when there's a major overheating problem. (Although a Pentium 33 I had ran happily for two years with no heatsink or fan - those were the days).
  20. In which case no matter how well your life is going, it must eventually get worse. Personally I see this way of thinking as far from positive. If things are going badly then 'fate' will make things better, if things are going well then it's inevitable that things will go wrong. If this is to be believed then what would be the point in trying? If things are going badly there's no reason to make an effort to improve them because 'cosmic hamony' will step in for you. If things are going well there's no point making them better because said 'cosmic harmony' will piss on your bonfire whatever you do. It smack of bad psychology, the sort that leads to people blaming everything but themselves for their problems.
  21. Interesting idea but once the 'luck' line has deviated from the centre there is no reason for it to return, the next event(s) just take the new line as the centre. An example (anybody more mathematical that me should feel free to back this up with a proper description): Flipping a coin 100 times one can expect at the end for the total number of heads and tails to be split 50/50. What happens if the first 10 flips are all heads? This is unlikely to happen but let's assume it to be the case. The eleventh flip has no knowledge of the first 10, so the probability of a tails remains 0.5, exactly the same as it is for all flips. Once the first 10 flips are counted as heads the best we can assume is that after 20 flips the total number of heads will be 15 (half of flips 10 to 20). We cannot assume that we'll get 10 tails in a row to compensate for the 10 heads we had before. Essentially, once an event has happened we cannot take it into account to calculate the probability of subsequent events. Once you realise you've had 3 'bad luck' incidents it's too late and the probability of the next event being good as a result has nothing to do with the 3 bads. You could say that during the course of the day you could expect to have 3 good and 3 bad things happen but you can't wait for 3 bad to happen and then expect only good. On the psychological side of this theory: Surely when one is on a good luck streak the assumption is going to be that something bad is imminent. For every positively viewed bad day there will be a negatively viewed good day. This will surely lead to apathy - "Meh, what's the point in trying, if I make some things go well other things will go bad to compensate. I'll just sit here and watch TV".
  22. Laplink would allow you to transfer files via the serial or parallel port, it may also allow Internet access but I've never had a need for that so can't confirm. As for peer to peer networking with modems, I'm not sure if or how it would work. My gut feeling is that it's not going to happen as you have no means of dialing into the one machine from the other (no exchange to recognise the number dialled). If you could get it working it would be something of a hack and you'd likely get a very slow connection speed. It's far better to get a PCMCIA LAN card for the laptop and a NIC for the PC (both inexspensive these days) and connect them using a crossover cable.
  23. A wireless router would solve that problem and I've found mine to work very reliably.
  24. Slow news day for the media I think. This scare has been blown completely out of proportion. The dye has been known as carcinigenic since the nineties and was used in foods until 2001 in many parts of Europe (in some parts it was only banned in 2003). The amount in the listed foods can be considered trace and the risk are miniscule. When will somebody regulate the press properly and stop them abitrarily scare-mongering when they've nothing else to do that day?
  25. Don't be too cocky 5614! Some CPU's need you to actually create tracks on the chip itself before you can overclock. Also, in many cases removing the side panel and other parts breaks up the airflow and actually reduces cooling. You have some interesting ideas but you're not always correct, please bear that in mind when you make absolute statements.
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